Lookin' Good
by Artemismoon91904
Summary: Tony is a lot older than the rest of the Avengers think. Them finding out doesn't go over so well with Tony, and though they promise their opinions of him haven't changed, it's obvious that they're treating him differently.
1. That's Pretty Old

**Summary: Tony is older than the rest of the Avengers think. When they find out his real age, they can't help but treat him differently. He hates it.**

* * *

Clint tried the door again.

"I'm sorry, Agent Barton, but I would recommend against disturbing Mr. Stark. He hasn't slept at all in four days and I only just managed to convince him to take a rest," Jarvis sounded from the device Tony had put in Clint's hearing aids.

"Okay, fine, but we need pizza money. He can fall back asleep."

"As you wish." The AI sounded more irritated than an AI should be able to sound. The door clicked open and Clint opened it, surprised to find that it was dark and Tony was actually probably sleeping. Honestly, he had figured that it was some excuse to prevent people from coming in. The Great Tony Stark didn't need sleep, after all. But now that Clint realised his mistake, he couldn't help feeling a little bad.

Tony rolled over in a quilt cocoon, face barely visible in what little light was streaming in from the hallway. "What is it, Legolas? Come to take this rare opportunity and kill me in my sleep?"

"If I could find your body," the archer fired back before getting to the point. "We're ordering pizza and you're buying."

Tony groaned a little as he shimmied a hand out of his blanket and reached into his night table drawer. "If I'm buying, you're saving me some." He threw his wallet at Clint and buried himself back. "Now scram."

Clint did as he was told and left in peace with his prize. As much as he hated to admit it, there was some tinge of worry about Tony in the back of his mind. He obviously didn't really take care of himself, especially when it came to sleeping. Everyone knew that, at least physically since you can't really compare actuality when you have Cap and Thor in the mix, Tony was the oldest Avenger. He always seemed the least mature, and not only in that he couldn't take anything seriously, but he also couldn't really be left responsible for himself. He might've forgotten to eat until he literally starved to death if it hadn't been for Jarvis. If anything, it seemed like Stark's habits were getting worse, and he wasn't getting any younger.

Come to think of it, how old _was_ Tony? Fifty? That was scary to think about.

He looked at the wallet in his hands while he waited for the elevator to take him up to the common floor where everyone was waiting on him to start whatever game Natasha would beat them at tonight. They hadn't invited Tony because they had been told ahead of time not to disturb him all this week. Some massive project with a deadline.

Stepping into the elevator, Clint popped open the wallet and leafed through it. Just the cash in here would be enough to buy a small car. Credit card, library card (why?), frozen yogurt card with one punch left until a free yogurt (again, why?), and his drivers license.

"Don't mind if I do..." Clint muttered to himself as he pulled it out.

The elevator doors opened just in time for the rest of the Avengers to see Clint's mouth drop open as he blinked at the birth date. He was sure he was either reading it wrong, or his math was way off. There was no way-

"What do you have there?" Nat was next to him before he even knew she had moved. She plucked the card out of his hands and scanned it. Her eyebrows shot up and then crinkled together. "Tony is seventy-one!?"

Variations of "what" followed by the floor inhabitants jumping up to see for themselves ensued.

"Forgive me, but I'm not sure I quite understand," Thor said.

After a very brief discussion about Asgardian lifespans, Bruce figured out that Thor was 23 in human years, and translated for Thor that Tony would be about 4,950 years old in Asgardian terms. To this Thor gasped.

"Why is an elder still on the front lines of battle!?" Thor exclaimed so loudly that Clint actually feared that Tony might wake up to that unpleasant comment.

"If you call him that to his face he might kill you," Natasha warned in a tone so casual it seemed like obvious fact.

"I do not mean it as an insult. To be an elder in Asgard is a great honour."

"Hey, uh, Jarvis?" A question of his own occurred to Steve.

"Yes, Captain Rogers?" Jarvis him know that he was there and listening.

"What's life expectancy like nowadays?"

Natasha hit him for insinuating that he though Tony could keel over of old age any day now.

"Compared to 1944," Steve added as glared at Natasha.

"As of 2017, the average lifespan of an American male is 78.12 years. As of 1944, it was 63.6 years. But I can assure you that Mr. Stark will live well beyond that, assuming he doesn't die in battle or blow himself up." Was that a hint of sass in his artificial voice? Probably. Tony made him.

"So, should we do something about this?" Clint said after only a moment of silence. The card was still being passed around. Thor couldn't figure out how to read it.

"Like what? He seems perfectly capable despite his age. Until it atually becomes a problem, it isn't one," Cap took charge as the leader.

Clint resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "Alright, but if he falls and breaks a hip, remember that it was your call not to keep an eye on him."

Natasha shook her head at him. "He's not made of porcelain."

"Obviously not, but there's still-"

Steve interrupted. "I didn't say we wouldn't be keeping a bit of a closer eye on him, we just won't take any action unless it's needed. Unless I deem it needed."

"You're the boss," Clint didn't sound too happy about that fact.

"I don't think we have anything to worry about," Bruce said. "I've more or less been his doctor for a while and I honestly thought he was forty-five."

The group continued talking, unaware that Tony was watching and listening to the security feed. He made a mental note to sabotage Clint's hearing aids out of pure spite. His hands shook with nerves, or maybe anger. When a familiar feeling overtook him he knew it was nerves, escalated to an anxiety attack. He ran to his bathroom, using the walls and then the sink counter to stable himself. He doused his face in water as cold as he could run it and tried to breathe. It wasn't even that big of a deal. So what if they knew his age? The most they could do was make jokes. And maybe he did need to be watched more closely.

A wave of nausea hit him and the pain in his chest tightened. Bad thoughts, okay, bad thoughts. He sat on the cool bathroom floor and waited it out, one harsh breath at a time.


	2. Morning Meeting

**This is a super short chapter but I wanted to get something published. I'll make it up to you next time.**

* * *

Tony managed to calm down after about an hour. His nerves were shot. There was no hope of sleeping now, and he was too busy to anyway. With the company already losing money, this project had to go through. Not that he didn't have enough money to last him the rest of his life, but seeing the balance go down by hundreds of thousands each month was not a fun experience. He had stopped reading the reports a while ago.

He got dressed to help make him feel more productive and headed down to his lab to continue his nonstop work.

"Sir," Jarvis's voice interrupted Tony's loud music, and he already knew why. "The sun is rising." He had asked Jarvis to tell him when the sun rose and set, when it was 9:00am, 9:00pm, noon, and midnight if he was working. Otherwise, he would be at a complete loss as to how long he had been working and whether he needed to eat, sleep, or drink. It got messy when he put the AI on mute and forgot about it.

"Thanks, J." He slid his chair away from the desk and spun it around, running his hands over his face and through his hair. Coffee. He needed coffee.

The kitchen, unfortunately, wasn't as empty as he thought it would be.

Tony stopped dead in his tracks. "What are you doing up?"

Steve looked up from tying his shoe. "Going for a run."

Tony looked the captain up and down to try to judge whether he was going to say something about the events of the night before, or whether he was on edge at all. It didn't seem so. Tony froze and continued on his way to turn on the coffee maker.

"It's pretty early," Tony commented casually. He drummed his fingers on the counter a few times out of impatient boredom.

"I'm a morning person." He finished adjusting his socks and laces to perfection and stood, shoulders back and hands on his hips, looking every bit of the hero he was. Tony slouched against the wall and waited on the coffee machine, feeling completely useless in comparison.

"I'm barely a person." Tony checked on the coffee again, as if it had finished within the last five seconds. Steve wasn't leaving. "Do you have something to say, or...?"

Tony could see Steve searching for words, or maybe the will to say them.

Tony sighed and gave in, pushing himself off the wall and wandering towards Steve, arms crossed. "You know I have security cameras all over, right?"

Steve looked down for little more than a second. "You saw."

"Well there was more to listen to than to see. But yeah." He pressed his lips together, raising his eyebrows and blinking for a second too long. "Thank's for not kicking me off, I guess," he sassed with a scoff.

"If age meant anything, I wouldn't be here. It's about capability."

"Alright, Spangles. Thanks for the pep talk, or whatever. Now go for your run, you morning freak."

"I could kick you for your attitude, you know," Steve mockingly threatened.

"You love me too much to do that." Tony pouted, then turned to retrieve his coffee.

"Hey, Tony." Steve caught his attention and he turned around. "You do still need sleep like the rest of us. You can't run on caffeine."

"Yes I can. I have been for, like, sixty years." He poured his drink with a smirk that was only for show.

"Just take care of yourself." The super soldier jogged off at a speed that would match Tony's sprinting.

He shook his head and brought his mug and the whole pot of coffee down to his lab.


	3. They Know

**I wanted to give a little _historical context _for Tony's age making sense before I continue:**

 **Tony Stark first appears as Iron Man in a comic published in 1963. Unlike most comic stories where time in history isn't an issue, making for them to be replicable in the MCU in 'modern day' whenever that happened to be, Tony is tied to a stationary point in history due to Howard's link with Captain America. WWII is an unmoving point in real time and marvel time (comic and cinematic universes). Howard is an adult in 1944 when he works with Steve, Steve becomes a Capsicle, Tony is born, and then many unspecified years later after a ton of other events, Iron Man is born and the events of the MCU proceed. Howard in The First Avenger seems to be in his 20's or early 30's, which with other dates given for points would mean that he was in his 50's when he had Tony. That isn't super probable. Going off of RDJ's age for Tony's in the MCU, he would be 53 (at the point I'm writing this). If you shift Howard's age back about twenty years from the point of assumption that he had Tony in his 50's, you get his 30's, which is a lot more reasonable. That also would make Tony about twenty years older, in his 70's. I placed his birth year in 1946, making him 71 at the time of me writing this, because two years after Cap 'dying' seemed like a fair amount of time for Howard's life to get settled and him to have a kid.**

 **So if you were interested, there's my logic for this piece. Now enjoy the non-analytical writing of it.**

* * *

After working for another long, long time since his encounter with Steve, Tony finally ran out of coffee around the time of his 9:00 alert. He finished up some of his more sensitive work before grabbing a Stark Pad and the now empty coffee pot, taking the elevator upstairs to the common room and kitchen where no doubt most of the tower would be awake and ready to judge him. Tony was intent on acting just the same as (if not more capable than) before.

So, of course, the first thing he did was yeet himself over a sofa.

But he needed an excuse to do so. So pot and mug balanced in one hand and Stark Pad under his armpit, he launched himself, narrowly missing Natasha's head with his body, and grabbed an empty cup on the coffee table with his free hand. He held it up and waved it like a martyr for the rest of the room to see. Their attention had already been grabbed by his (quite small) stunt, and they looked, for the most part, like _they_ were the ones about to have a heart attack.

"Seriously?" Tony started on his speech while sauntering over to the kitchen. "I emerge from my lair- don't tell me it's not a lair- to replenish my life juice, and you guys have _stuff_ laying around? It's from last night, right? And still no one- you know what, I give up. Just show me to the leftover pizza. There better be some, Barton, that was our deal. And yes, I was conscious enough to remember."

Clint eyed him but bit his tongue for fear of the wrath of Steve. "Fridge, top shelf." He bit back every insult. The unusual empty, straight-forwardness wasn't lost on Tony or the rest of the room, and they suddenly all knew that Tony had heard then when he chose not to comment on it and grabbed his pizza instead. He nudged past Bruce who willingly made way for him to put the coffee pot back where it belonged and brew another pot. All eyes were on him. Most were careful, worried. Thor's were almost reverent. That freaked Tony out a bit.

He dropped Natasha's empty tea mug in the sink then leaned against the counter and bounced restlessly off of it with his palms behind his back against the cool granite. She was the only one who didn't seem to be paying him special attention, scrolling through world news on her phone and smirking (god that scared him) at some of the more violent headlines. Slowly, conversation faded back in, though it all felt stifled.

When the pot clicked to signal it had finished, Tony finally couldn't take it anymore. "I was watching the security cameras last night. Something _very interesting_ happened." He said as pointedly as possible, coming off quite mad in the process. He met Clint's eyes. "I expect compensation for your nosiness."

Natasha slowly lowered her phone into her lap and risked a glance over. "It's not a big deal, Tony."

"Yeah? Okay. How old are you?"

She didn't break her gaze, but paused, tongue shifting in her mouth for a moment before she answered. "That's classified."

Tony huffed and rolled his eyes. "Doesn't matter anyway."

"Age should bring no shame." Thor declared sympathetically. Tony didn't respond, just brought his coffee down to the lab with him. He couldn't tell if his headache was from sleep deprivation, caffeine, stress, or all of the above. He had a pretty good idea.

In the common room, the atmosphere was left tense, but slowly settled. Steve hadn't come back yet from his run, so they had a chance to do something he might not approve of.

"Banner," Natasha said as affectionately as her training allowed,"You mentioned you were basically Tony's doctor. What can you tell us?"

He did try to decline, but if Natasha wanted information, she got it, and then the whole room knew all of his problems. Even Clint felt like this was going too far into his personal privacy. He listened with the rest anyway.


End file.
